Eighteen thousand police gone in the last year. Seventy-one thousand jobs in education lost. Eighty-five thousand public administration posts cut. Even the NHS, which the government swears blind it has ringfenced from its spending cuts, has had to get rid of 31,000 staff. Less than two years since they moved into Downing Street, David Cameron and George Osborne have managed to hack the public sector to its smallest since the summer of 2003.

Cameron thinks that making these job losses will help bring the deficit under control. But more broadly, the Conservatives believe that government uses resources – tax money, workers, even loans – that should go towards businesses. As Osborne put it in his first budget, back in June 2010, the state is "crowding out private endeavour".

Well, the cuts have delivered plenty of pain all right – but the gain is much harder to see. Over the past year, the public sector has lost 270,000 jobs while the private sector has gained only 226,000: hardly the promised economic renaissance. And as Duncan Weldon, an economist at the TUC points out, "Where the new jobs are being created is not where they are being lost".

You can see what he means in yesterday's breakdown of the jobs figures. They show that the north-east has an unemployment rate higher than Bulgaria's – with over one in 10 out of a job. The south-east on the other hand has a lower jobless rate than Germany.

In his first major speech as prime minister, Cameron rightly observed: "Our economy has become more and more unbalanced, with our fortunes hitched to a few industries in one corner of the country."

Yet the evidence is that he has made Britain's even more lopsided, by pushing through a historic programme of cuts without any counterbalancing growth strategy – especially for that vast swath of the country north of Watford. At this rate, even if the coalition's bets for a turnaround by 2015 come off, it will have delivered an economy that is recovered but unreformed.